


Augur For A Riptide

by thehobblefootalchemist



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, I just have entirely too many feelings about Hermann, I told myself I wouldn't but here I am joining the post-Uprising Sad Fic Brigade, M/M, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), This is a take on his first sit-down moment after everything that happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 12:44:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14213436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehobblefootalchemist/pseuds/thehobblefootalchemist
Summary: It has been two hours since the confrontation at Mt. Fuji.  Hermann creates a tally.Or, where room to breathe leaves room for a lot of other things too, and hardly any are kind.





	Augur For A Riptide

Somewhere, a transport is bringing Newton Geiszler towards the base at which he is stationed. Strange to think that a notion which mere days ago had brought such sunlight into his life could now gut him more efficiently than a hunting knife.

Fuji was over-with. Done. A thing left to be sorted out by the bureaucrats and whatever toxicity containment units hadn’t been massacred in the kaiju’s initial landing in the country. Nothing remaining for one poor scientist to oversee—just as well, for he was not confident he could get a good look past the black phantom waters closing in over his head.

Luckily Hermann’s physical grip was better than his emotional one. His hand saw him through with faithful white-knuckle strength when he was finally able to get away from the command center, bearing his weight in conjunction with his ever-present walking aid as he made his way toward his lab. His chin was level, jaw set, but level and locked in the way one must hold a house of cards steady in transit lest one wrong breath send the whole thing crashing down.

Mercifully no one interrupted his measured stagger and he was able to lock his door behind him without having to interact with another soul. He didn’t think he had enough soul left intact to manage it.

He sat in the nearest chair to catch his breath. It caught—and caught, and caught. Caught until it cracked, cracked until the sobs he’d been holding in for so many hours finally burst loose.

Somewhere along the line of his crying the fit became an outlet for more emotion than just sorrow, and Hermann was distantly shocked when he came back to himself enough to find that at some point he’d stood up; that papers had scattered, that the surface of his desk had several heavy dents that had not been there before, that the tendons of his fingers shone bone-pale where they grasped in stranglehold around his cane.

That was what did it in the end, what drained him more than anything: that ache in his hand. It leeched away his stamina, his will to put on a brave face, even the ghostly roaring water. When he slumped against the desk he did not know if he did it as Hermann Gottlieb or as a husk.

How heavy the weight of knowing Newton’s hands had likely hurt in the same way. Those talented, nimble, _genius_ hands, that had so lately been wrapped around his neck as their owner breathed the devastated apology that had been his only honest words in years.

His eyes stung again, but only in a dull, itchy sort of nuisance. It seemed his store of tears was as fickle as fate and did not intend to allow him any more just now, in spite of the many types of pain he was in.

His leg was screeching raw-throated fury. It seethed at him even on the best of days anymore, but even a healthy body was not made to move the way he had done when he’d assaulted Shao. The lowest possible price for keeping Newton’s brain on the inside of his tormented skull, certainly, but still one he would be paying for at least a month to come.

One of the things, though, about living with chronic pain, is that it forced an individual to come up with creative coping mechanisms. Hermann suspected that once he’d gotten his composure back he could conceivably dissociate himself from the worst of the agony; after all, he’d always found pain easier to block off and compartmentalize the further away it was from his head, and it was not (and he thanked god for this, always thanked god for this) as though it would interfere with his capability of making calculations.

However, this same pain-distance ratio table made the spectral lancing echo in his chest a thing that was…fairly concerning.

(concern was the word Hermann substituted for his actual feeling of _acute terror_ , because otherwise it was a nigh certainty that a rock would start rolling down the slope of panic and do its level best to skin him alive)

He’d managed to pass it off as a celebratory gesture—at the time, everyone had been making them—but the fact was that when the jaeger collided with the amalgamate colossus Hermann had flinched, and had done so because _he had felt the kaiju die_. For an instant, the innards spattered across that field of snow had been indistinguishable to him from his own.

He’d not had this sort of reaction before. Ten years ago, even fresh from his drift with the hive mind—when he would have thought he would have been most open to such a connection—Scunner’s death had not fazed him, and nor had Raiju’s. Not even Slattern’s, whose body had been maimed in so many spectacular degrees before its chest cavity had finally been rent open in hellfire.

This…no, Hermann had no hypothesis for why it should be so.

_Unless those dreams you’ve been having aren’t just dreams._

The realization was his own, but some faint suggestion of remembered _other_ made the thought seem slick as sin, its undercurrent carrying along giggled, wicked glee entirely too much like what he’d heard in Shao’s office for him not to react to it in physical recoil. Was that what this was? Not something to be put under the umbrella of post-traumatic stress, as he’d assumed, but a continued, real-time link to the Precursor plane and the monstrosities that populated it?

His gaze—a glassy thing, with far too much gray about its edges—was trained on a blank far wall for quite some time. Facing his nightmares had been easier before knowing that they had likely been staring right back.

But slowly, a second possibility regarding his night terrors dawned on him, hindsight’s fist closing around his stomach with enough force that he became nauseous: that attempted dreamsharing had been Newton’s way of calling out to him across their lingering drift for help, and it was only that he could not shout out without it being drowned by the snarling of the hive.

He did not know which supposition upset him more.

_I’m sorry,_ the memory of Newton’s voice whispered, and moisture once more managed to arc down Hermann’s cheek.

Dimly, he eventually registered that he was going to collapse if he kept on standing any longer. He dragged his wrathful musculature towards a better chair, the one at his main desk, and tried not to focus on the fact that his leg was not now the worst suffering he had in his life experienced. Even seeing Newton change the placement of the ring on his hand had not been comparable to this.

(years and years ago, a Hermann existed that thought heartbreak a mere theoretical; he equal parts wanted to hit him and engulf him in a hug of deepest pity)

Hermann’s favorite photograph lay within arm’s reach. Inevitably his eye was drawn to it: to the ink-and-paper depiction of the person he knew and cared for above all others—to his candid, unfettered smile, which the world would not see the like of again for a very long time.

_They’re in my head,_ he had said, in dismay and supplication, just as used, just as in danger as the man his hands had been attempting to kill.

_They might be in mine too,_ Hermann thought back now, the admittance of the possibility making him feel hollow.

But there exists a very powerful phrase, and that phrase is _and yet_.

It was possibly the most beautiful thing about the Drift, after all: that it was a two-way street. The Precursors had exploited a weakened defense, but there was no reason that the reverse should not be possible. And they had already shown that they had the capability of mistaken calculation—because if they’d thought that the merest glimpse that Newton was still there somewhere behind those dead-alive eyes was going to break him, rather than instill in him the ambition to personally tear their empire down…well.

He was going to take great joy in proving who the better mathematician was.


End file.
